Gamification as a strategy

Gamification is a design approach able to create high-engagement digital solutions.

The Digital ecosystem by definition is in constant evolution and it’s becoming stratified on many different levels. Not just social interaction, but a proper content experience for customers/users (Customer Experience). Contents become effective when they’re able to engage the user both on an interactive level and in terms of the values and emotions that they can convey.

How can we measure the effectiveness of an experience? Obviously by the level of engagement that it can generate and by its ability to last over time.

It’s in this setting that Gamification inserts itself, as an approach to digital design that aims at the application of playful mechanisms to diverse everyday experiences.

This approach stems from the premise that people are led to take part in (technological) experiences when these are associated with positive and engaging emotions. Just as it happens with successful video gaming experiences, where the users are willing to invest much time on completing different actions, some of which are very repetitive.

Gamification becomes a useful design approach to create digital solutions that can generate engagement, in order to convey different emotions and values.

Adding playful elements to the technological experiences becomes effective because it gives you the opportunity to converse with the human experience at a more natural and deep level. It’s in this space that brands, once they have hooked the user’s attention and motivation, have the possibility of transmitting intangible elements such as values and qualities, elements that could scarcely go that deep through traditional advertising.

To create digital actions with playful contents marketing operators need to involve more complex skills, necessary to fully understand how the user experience structures itself with technology, how its motivation is made, how it springs from playful elements, and how these can be translated into contemporary technological interactions able to convey engaging contents.

Alquadrato has been able to experiment this innovative approach creating 1Click Donation+ Kinder+Sport. An interactive experience with playful features wad designed with the goal of generating clicks towards sports associations supported by Kinder.

The main game elements are:

• a story: Kinder supports amateur sports, helping their diffusion throughout the Net; • playful motivational drivers: the users’ cooperation, the voting process, the badges, the virality that participants can generate; • interactive ecosystem: from the tab on Facebook it was possible to land on the initiative’s website and the pages of the individual sports association.